New Graphical Representation of the Periodic Table

KentuckyFC writes "The great power of Mendeleev's periodic table was that it allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. But can this arrangement be improved? Two new envisionings of the periodic table attempt to do just that. The first uses a new graphical representation that shows the relative sizes of atoms as well as their groups and periods. The other uses the same kind of group theoretical approach that particle physicists developed to classify particles by their symmetries (abstract). That helped particle physicists predict the existence of new particles, but may have limited utility for chemists who seem to have discovered (or predicted) all of the elements they need already."

Comments

Huh

[Dyinobal]

looks like something that should be on a game show. "I'll take Silicon for 500!"

Re:Huh

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

looks like something that should be on a game show. "I'll take Silicon for 14!"

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Huh

[Canazza]

this looks like it should be on star trek - and it's much nicer looking than that silly circular one

Re:Huh

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Dude, it's a dart board.

Re:Huh

[AliasMarlowe]

Looking at the 1951 Longman version http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/ChemicalGalaxy_Longman_1951.jpg, it would seem that Microsoft's researcher has "innovated" to the usual Microsoft extent: backwards (the ancient spiral arrangement is superior from many points of view).

Call me a cynic..

[Afforess]

but that design doesn't look much better than the current one. In fact, it looks worse. Helium and Hydrogen overlap, and part of the table is cut off completely. Some might whine that part of the table is cut off in the current version too, but that's just to make it fit on a page, it actually is one contiguous body.

I believe the age-old axiom "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" applies here.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[Afforess]

To quote someone far more famous than I,
"Form follows Function"

The current version is very useful. One can tell which atom is larger than another by simply looking down the column of the element, or across the period (row). The Electron Affinity increases across the period, and up the columns. Many periodic trends can easily be told by the current chart. It is extremely helpful and useful in that regard.

Should we throw away all that usefulness in the name of "fresh" and "new" ideas? I think not.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[annodomini]

I like this one a lot better.

Anyhow, having new designs for representing the periodic table is not a bad thing. Sometimes seeing the same information presented in different ways can help visualize it. I approve of people trying to improve the display of the elements and their periodic relationships, even if as a general purpose reference I'll probably stick with the tried and true table.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[Volante3192]

The major problem I see with it is they stitched the table ends together rather than really account for size. You have to know the previous one to make any sense of the new one.

Take the first inner ring: it LOOKS like it goes B - C - N - O - F - Ne - Li - Be... and that puts 10 right next to 3.

Makes sense if you KNOW to start counting at Lithium, but if you're just looking at the table, you will naturally start at Boron. More annoyingly is that puts a very unreactive element first. The great part about the old one is it went from very reactive, to minimally reactive, to very reactive (with a brief stop to inertsville). Again, you lose that having the top line bookended by Boron and Beryllium.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[Anachragnome]

I think you are like me--a visual thinker.

Some people quite simply comprehend things more efficiently when the information is supplied in a context that is comfortable to them.

An example of this I used to use as an automotive mechanic was alignment angles of the steering and suspension systems. They can be related numerically, or graphically, but there is a third context that is what I tried to teach the younger mechanics in the shops I worked at--spatial. Some mechanics had a very difficult time translating numbers to making a car go in a straight line (it can be far more difficult then one might imagine). I tried to make correlations between the numbers and, say for instance, the angle the front struts actually lean forward and backward equaling -/+ caster changes--to attempt to get the image of the strut in their mind 3-dimensionally. When they could imagine visually the changes the numbers represented, it all fell into place--they understood it.

These changes to the table simply make it more accessible to people that think more visually. While it may work well for some, it may not for others. And that is just fine. Use what works for you.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[residieu]

Why is "Towards the center is the smaller" easier than "The top is smaller"? The other trend in atomic sizes is size decreases as you go, right, and this new chart totally destroys that. It looks like Lithium and Neon should be similar in size (since they're right next to each other), but Lithium is the largest in its row and Neon the smallest. If they wanted to show the center is smaller, they shouldn't have shown the elements in circular rings, but as sort of a spiral-shape. All the Noble gases should be shown as closer to the center than the Alkali Metals (Lithium and its column, excluding Hydrogen)

Re:Call me a cynic..

[buchner.johannes]

In whatever way you present it, natures elements are messed up ;-)

This link lists pretty much all the tables:
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt.html

Just wow. I didn't see yet how they account for the overlap between d/p/s/f.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[Mr. Freeman]

The current one doesn't give the sizes of the atoms because the size DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IN MOST CASES. Size generally has not a whole lot to do with any properties. Any size-based properties are very general. e.g. "Very big atoms are unstable". It does you very little to no good to know if one atom is SLIGHTLY larger/smaller than another. You can get the difference between "very big" and "very small" with the current table, and because that's all that matters, the current table is just fine.

I can't even read half of the circular table because it's UPSIDE FUCKING DOWN. What a stupid way to represent something. I suppose that if the creator spent more than 10 fucking seconds working on it then they might have realized that they could have flipped the upper half upside down again to make ALL of the elements readable. Of course, that still doesn't help the fact that I don't know where the periods begin or end. It's a circle, there's no start or end part marked. The current table has these nifty things called ROWS and COLUMNS (or periods and groups respectively, for those of you that actually paid any attention in chemistry).

"And the gaps create an immediate sense of wonder." That's CONFUSION, not wonder. The periodic table is a reference and a tool, not a motivational poster or something that should create "wonder". I don't know what field you work in, but I'm going to guess that you use one or more reference books on a regular basis. Imagine taking these reference books, flipping half the pages upside down, and reorganizing the entire thing to make it half as useful but make you "wonder" more. Does that sound like a good idea? Of course not!

Imagine saying, "HEY! Let's take the charts that machinists use to convert between metric, standard, and decimal standard and make them into a circle to illustrate the fact that diameters are related to circles!" You'd be shot, and rightfully so. Imagine taking the dictionary and reorganizing it by which words evoke which emotions rather than by alphabetical order. Same thing.

And you seem to assume that the periodic table is only used by "today's youth". The periodic table is used by ANY CHEMIST doing ANY CHEMISTRY WORK. Again, it's a bloody reference tool. The only reason you assume that most of the people that use the periodic table are children is because you're ignorant of what it actually is or what it's actually used for. You saw it in high school, have never used it since (not surprising if you don't work in a chemistry-related job), but never really stopped to think what it actually is other than a worthless table you had to look at in class.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[mcgrew]

I believe the age-old axiom "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" applies here.

That maxim is from the uneducated; it actually should read "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But it seldom applies in real life. One needs to do maintenance on nearly any system; you don't wait until your car quits running before you replace the spark plugs, for example.

And if that maxim was universally followed, there would be no technological progress at all. "This device works fine, don't improve it."

However, some "improvements" are like trying to increase your car's gas mileage by taking out half the spark plugs. This chart seems to be like that. Perhaps there is a better way to make the table, but I agree, this isn't it.

Re:Call me a cynic..

[mcgrew]

To quote someone far more famous than I,
"Form follows Function"

That's the first rule of design (programmers, PLEASE learn that rule!). I never heard who was the originator. So I just now looked it up on Wikipedia.

Origins of the phrase
The authorship of the phrase is often ascribed to the American sculptor Horatio Greenough[2], whose thinking to a large extent predates the later functionalist approach to architecture. It was, however, the American architect Louis Sullivan who coined the phrase, in 1896, in his article The tall office building artistically considered. Here Sullivan actually said 'form ever follows function', but the simpler (and less emphatic) phrase is the one usually remembered. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single "rule that shall permit of no exception". The full quote is thus:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.[3]

Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th Century Chicago at the very moment when technology, taste and economic forces converged violently and made it necessary to drop the established styles of the past. If the shape of the building wasn't going to be chosen out of the old pattern book something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. It was 'form follows function', as opposed to 'form follows precedent'. Sullivan's assistant Frank Lloyd Wright adopted and professed the same principle in slightly different form--perhaps because shaking off the old styles gave them more freedom and latitude.

Microsoft research

[gmuslera]

Is not strange the color scheme... you can see clearly now the Blue Elements of Death

Still not right

[schon]

If you're gonna go and change it, why not make it correct while you're at it?

Teach the controversy, people!

Re:Still not right

[stephanruby]

Actually, I wish all Science diagrams would be as entertaining as that one.

Now on a more serious note, it would seem this guy just worked off this existing wheel design without giving a proper citation (the credit goes to Clumma on that technologyreview.com blog for finding it). And he didn't improve on that wheel design (except for the new cooler looking black background) his copy is much worse than the original (quite unreadable). It's no surprise he developed it while working for Microsoft. It sounds like he took a page out of Microsoft's playbook.

Screen rotation problem?

[Haxamanish]

From the article:

Unfortunately, Abubakr's arrangement means that the table can only be read by rotating it. That's tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.

Please, can somebody find a solution to this important screen rotation problem?

Re:Screen rotation problem?

[swanzilla]

Netbook. That leaves the tricky textbook rotation puzzle...

this has been going on for some time

[Trepidity]

To quote a history book (pp. 20-21):

The way in which the periodic system is displayed is a fascinating one that especially appeals to the popular imagination. Since the time of the early periodic tables of John Newlands, Julius Lothar Meyer, and Dimitri Mendeleev, there have been many attempts to obtain the "ultimate" periodic table. Indeed, it has been estinated that within 100 years of the introduction of Mendeleev's famous table of 1869, approximately 700 different versions of the periodic table were published. These include all kinds of alternatives, including three-dimensional tables, helices, concentric circles, spirals, zigzags, step tables, and mirror image tables. Even today, articles are regularly published in the Journal of Chemical Education, for example, purporting to show new and improved versions of the periodic system.

Re:Spiral Form

[tpjunkie]

The atomic radii don't progress in a nice orderly linear increase in size with increasing element number; in fact each period overlaps part of the period that comes before it...

Circle table is bad

[LotsOfPhil]

the table can be improved by arranging it in circular form. He says this gives a sense of the relative size of atoms--the closer to the centre, the smaller they are--something that is missing from the current form of the table. ... And by placing hydrogen and helium near the centre, Abubakr says this solves the problem of whether to put hydrogen with the halogens or alkali metals and of whther to put helium in the 2nd group or with the inert gases.

The atom size thing is no more present in the circular table than in the normal table. If distance from the center correlates with size, then Li and Ne are the same size according to the circular table. Lithium is about twice as big.

As for the H/He placement, helium is a noble gas, there is no question about that.

The circle table also mucks up the order of filling. Why are neon and lithium next to each other?

Site Full of Periodic Tables

[Jack9]

Another periodic table, is not news.
Someone should have already linked one of the periodic table databases like:

http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php

Re-inventing the wheel?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The new table that came out of Microsoft Research just seems silly. The idea that "closer to the middle means smaller atoms" is a new contribution seems bogus - with the traditional table, closer to the top means smaller atoms. Really the only advantage I can see is the separation of hydrogen and helium away from the other atom groups, which is something that could be easily accomplished using the current table. The circular design itself is a BIG disadvantage.

The second table seems like a more interesting concept. I tried making it through the actual paper - while it sounds like the author thinks the information conveyed in his redesign are better than in the current layout, I didn't see that it actually conveyed new information.

Disclaimer: I have done grad work in physics; but that was almost 20 years ago, and I don't work in anything even close to the field anymore.

Re:Re-inventing the wheel?

[reverseengineer]

The second table and the ideas surrounding it are really restatements of the theoretical basis for the rules of electron configuration (the Aufbau principle). As a consquence of following Fermi-Dirac statistics, a lot of properties for electrons fall naturally out of associated symmetry groups, including quantum numbers and the Pauli exclusion principle. So in Kibler's group theory representation, elements are really just sorted by arrangment of quantum number, which is really just an alternative positioning of what we'd consider the s-, p-, d-, and f- "blocks" of elements in the current table. The group theory table is interesting in that it makes the group theory underpinnings of the periodic table more clear, but those foundations have been known since about 1930.

Re:not new

[MaggieL]

Yeah, but remeber, it's from Microsoft Research. They're innovators, dammit!

Not only have the patented the round table, they've also patented the time machine they're going to use to back in time and sue Erdmann and Mendeleev.

And then King Arthur.

Database of periodic tables:
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=167

Re:You're a cynic! :p ;)

[LotsOfPhil]

The chemical properties of the elements are almost entirely based on how full the electron shells are, and I think a circular diagram represents that better.

Concentric circles don't show that any better than rows do. What rows do better is clearly indicate that the shells get filled in a certain order (left to right). Looking at the circle table, which has more electrons, Li or Ne? F or Ne? Is that intuitive or better?

thanks a lot

[circletimessquare]

you just gave dan brown the major plot point for his next robert langdon symbologist novel

Table has many purposes

[tygt]

While the representation of the modern table can be considered cumbersome, it has a number of benefits - it's easy to see at a glance how various elements are related to each other (such as the noble gasses, the 1A metals, etc). Granted the circle arranges elements in groups as well (radially), but see if you can quickly find a specific group of elements... right, there you go, the traditional table does make that easier. Another thing that I like about the traditional table is that I can draw the table out from memory and fill it in quite a ways mainly by the shape of it and via associative memory (much as I can find the names of the 50 states by filling in a blank map of the USA). The circlular table doesn't have the same raw appearance; it has too much symmetry to give me any other clues about where what should go where.

That said, though, jogging one's memory isn't the best use of a table; given one put in front of you it'd be nice if its organization alone gave you information. I suppose that the circular representation could do this, with perhaps a few labels.

Of course this circular representation isn't all that new; the Chemical Galaxy has been around for a number of years now and has a similar structure.

I've seen this before somewhere...

[tomatoguy]

In high-school chemistry I saw a chart like this, though arranged to accommodate the rare earths as their own separate but related group. It was nerd art for me - each element was assigned a shade of blue or red to indicate pH. I ordered two and they came with additional materials explaining the new chart. The charts are packed away, but I just looked up the hand-outs and tried to Google but found nothing. But, one of the had-outs is a reprint of a write-up in Chemistry magazine of September 1976. It was created by James Franklin Hyde, who is apparently the Father of Silicones acording to Wikipedia.

Oh, here's a link I just found to the chart http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=164

For the Internet Database of Periodic Tables, see http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?Button=Spiral+Formulations

Re:not new

[Thoguth]

The really interesting table on that site is this one:
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=35
Which is labeled "Wikipedia table" and dated 2006 ... Did Mohd rip off Wikipedia?

Fortunately for him, wikipedia's history traces back to this revision which was apparently made by Mohd Abubuakr himself, back in August 2006. He was in school at the time, at Jawaharlal Nehru Tech. According to his LinkedIn profile, he's not so much a green field researcher as he is a techie ... Performance and Security consulting. The article is a little misleading ... makes it sound like MS research has a skunk works in Hyderabad trying to invent a new periodic table.

His blog is cute too. A little emo, a little egotistical, but seems like a nice guy. I wonder what his /. handle is.